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The knowledge base on schoool improvement.
Some thoughts about what is known
and what actions are taken.
Paper presented at the International Workshop
The Challenge of School Transformation: What Works?
February 26th-28th, 1998
at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin
Mats Ekholm
University of Karlstad
S-651 88 Karlstad, Sweden
Knowledge about school culture and the development of schools have steadily
grown during the 20th century. Early works by Waller (1932) on the sociology
as well as on the social psychology of teaching have been updated several
times. Mort and Cornell (1941), who studied the tempo of American school
reforms during the thirties, left important traces for others to follow. During the
fifties Gordon (1956), as well as Coleman (1961), contributed with the
understanding of the dynamics of the relations between students as an important
explanation of school effectiveness. During the sixties Miles (1964) argued
against Mort´s and Cornell´s view that innovations in schools are slow
processes in his basic papers on innovation in education. He also put forward
his ideas on the healthy organisation (Miles, 1965) and Sugerman (1969)
presented a paper on the school as a social system, of which both have
stimulated later researchers in their understanding of the inner lives of schools.
Bocoock (1972) and Sclechty (1976) summarised sociological and social
psychological research on schools during this period.
British empirical contributions to the understanding of schools and their
transformations have grown from Hargreaves (1967, 1972) earlier works on the
inner lives in schools to more recent work based on this theoretical fundament
in combination with management of change theories (Hargreaves and Hopkins,
1991). Stenhouse (1977) pointed at the importance of the understanding of the
school and its change from a teacher point of view. In Scandinavian countries
Ekholm (1971) studied the inner lives of schools and contributed to the
understanding of the social development of students (Ekholm, 1976).
During the eighty´s co-operation between different approaches of school
improvement were stimulated by the OECD. Based on Dutch initiatives, more
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than a dozen volumes of condensed knowledge on school improvement were
produced. Themes were covered like the useful knowledge of school
improvement (van Velzen et al, 1985), what is known on long term effects of
school improvement efforts (Miles et al, 1987), dissemination of successful
practices (van den Berg et al, 1989), the use of school based review as a tool for
change (Bollen and Hopkins, 1987), how school improvement can be supported
(Seashore-Louis and Loucks-Horsley, 1989) and the role of school leaders in
school improvement (Gielen et al, 1987). This co-operation brought American
and European researchers on school improvement together and an intense
exchange of ideas took place.
During the early nineties new overviews of the knowledge on school
improvement have been presented. Fullan (1991) assisted by Stiegelbauer, have
a ripe volume on the new meaning of educational change, where he shows that a
lot of the knowledge so far used, have failed to effect improvement in schools.
This view have strong support in longitudinal studies made during 1980 - 1985
of 35 schools (Ekholm, 1987) and during 1969 until 1994 (Ekholm and Kull,
1996) of 9 schools in Sweden. In both these longitudinal studies schools have
much stayed the same although they have met strong demands to improve their
inner lives and also have received strong support to that.
Fullan (1991) are far from alone to present overviews of what we know about
school improvement work by now. Murphy and Hallinger (1993) and Guskey
and Huberman (1995) are examples of some other researchers that have edited
contributions to the understanding of actual knowledge on school improvement.
Fullan ends his overview of the knowledge field with some advice on how the
rich knowledge on school improvement and transformation can be more used.
He wants to replace an older, not well-functioning paradigm of school
improvement, with a new one that is based on six pillars.
New paradigms to help the utilisation of knowledge
He points at the necessity to change minds from negative to positive politics,
which in Block´s (1987) thinking mean that each person that wants something
good to happen, for instance in a school, have to work continually on shaping
and pursuing what is valuable. Fullan proposes that people who want good
change to occur in schools are helped by looking for alternative solutions
instead of monolithic ones. He put forwards the fact that more successful
improving schools and school districts have moved into a better future together
with some partner. He recommend schools to work in alliance with others and
also to change the thinking from an “if only“ to an “if I/we“ perspective. By the
latter Fullan refers to the power of keeping the perspective of what can be done
and not looking for why things are difficult to do in a school that need to
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develop. He recommends the improvers to accept the full richness of knowledge
about the change process.
We know many things about that process and it is a complicated and rich field,
where the improvement process not gains from being simplified. Fullan
especially draws the attention to the fact that improvement work need long term
conditions, several years, to become lasting. Finally Fullan concludes that it is
important to shift from development in schools based on isolated innovations to
a more broad institutional development. He identifies the problem of change
and stability in schools to consist of making too many efforts to innovate than is
possible to manage, which leads to many finished but not still alive innovative
projects in many schools. The important perspective is to create an
infrastructure for ongoing improvement in the school as an institution, not to
implement more of isolated innovations.
These learnings are close to the perspectives that Murphy and Hallinger (1993)
present in their close look on the research based on restructuring of schooling.
They find it useful to make a backward mapping with the eyes of students on
the change that need to take place and to focus on the improvement process
itself to be successful in the longer perspective. They also recommend
systematically work combined with school-specific approaches to the
improvement. They remind the developer of the need for support among schools
to help them to create better solutions. Beside some structural developments in
the lives of schools they also see cross-fertilisation between schools as an
important component of the development process as well as professional
development of teachers. Smylie (1995) elaborates how schools might be
redesigned to facilitate learning among teachers. He points at such inbuilt
qualities of schools as teacher collaboration, shared power and authority
between teachers and authorities, that need to be mixed with egalitarianism
among teachers as well as with variations, challenge, autonomy and choice in
teachers´ work. Smylie pays attention to the need for access for schools to
multiple sources of information for learning and external referents to help the
school to receive feedback on its strivings. He also pleas for schools to accept
teacher´s learning as a part of the definition of teacher work, so that the learning
of teachers can be an integrated part of the daily working life in the school.
Support of the new paradigms
In some studies of schools that have developed practices that improved the
qualities of the learning of the students, these pieces of the futuristic knowledge
basis have been used. For instance Huberman and Miles (1984) presented in
their close look upon innovational processes in twelve schools evidence for
several of the six conclusions that Fullan have drawn from his rich literature
overview. In two Scandinavian cross-national studies (Vasström, 1985 and
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Ekholm, 1986 and 1990), where fifteen improvement oriented schools were
followed over five years in each study, several parts of the knowledge basis for
lasting improvements was supported. For instance the importance of crossfertilisation between schools, the acceptance of improvement processes as
complicated ones, working on a broad front with the changes, to stimulate
learning among teachers as a part of the daily work are some of the components
that was supported. The same kind of support is given for the futuristic
knowledge basis by two other cross-national studies (Dalin et al, 1994 and
Hameyer et al, 1995). In the first of these studies, changes in 31 school sites in
three developing countries were analysed and in the second study the history of
fifteen schools in four industrialised countries, that had succeeded to
institutionalise activity-based practices in their inner working lives, were
analysed. Support is also given in a study conducted in rural Pakistan of 32
schools with different degree of success with their students (Farah et al, 1996).
Little use of school improvement knowledge
The knowledge that exists today on how school improvement can be carried out
to be effective, seem to be rich and full of nuances. In some parts the territory of
school improvement knowledge have had these qualities for a long time,
although, as Fullan (1991) pointed out, the use of the knowledge basis does not
seem to have worked well anyway. However this notion seem to be true also for
other research based knowledge that could be used by school people. As Tydén
et al (1995) points out, there are many signs that school people ignore
knowledge that is produced by researchers. One reason seem to be that the
researchers create their knowledge from another angle than the school people
use. Another reason seem to be that there are difficulties to get school people to
critically assess, re-examine and adapt the knowledge to their own reality.
During the nineties researchers try to formulate further knowledge thesis to
prevent a repetition of earlier lackings. It is important that these thesis are put
forward. It will help the collective process of creating more stable and reliable
knowledge about school improvement, but I doubt that the formulation of the
thesis will help the people that try to improve schools to reach better results. I
believe so because during the latest decades the utilisation of what is known
about the inner lives of schools, about the factors that create effective schools,
about the mechanisms behind successful innovative work in schools and about
the institutionalisation processes in schools, have been discreet. Or it might be
better to describe the utilisation of this widening knowledge basis about school
improvements as very restricted. Some few people widely scattered around the
world have grasped and used the knowledge about school improvement and
about how you might be able to get better results out of your school. This kind
of knowledge have not grown into the common owned and used knowledge that
appears as something self-evident in learning materials, as modules in pre-
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service training programmes for teachers or as parts of the knowledge structure
of professionals.
Frequent renaming of a young territory
During the last decades research that have grown on school improvement have
shifted name. During the late seventies the focus was on teachers and their
learning. In-service training of teachers was combined with an interest in the
development of schools. In the early seventies the term in use was school
development. For instance Dalin (1973) presented a series of books on this
topic. In many ways the focus of interest in the knowledge territory of school
improvement at this time was directed by views of a deficit paradigm
(Huberman and Guskey, 1995). Administrators, politicians, evaluators and
researchers determined the deficits and to some extent some of these actors held
the idea that something was lacking and needed to be corrected. Teachers were
more seen as change objects, than subjects of their own growth and holders of
the school improvement process. In one way you could say that teachers, as a
large collective, share the responsibility for these attitudes, together with the
others actors. The teachers were not interested to include a common shared
responsibility for the school as a working organisation into their professional
responsibilities. It seemed to have been enough to care for the students and for
the teaching. Therefore there have rarely been any request for school
improvement knowledge among the broad layers of teachers. That kind of
knowledge still have no place in the curriculum of the pre-service training of
teachers.
In the late seventies the focus was turning and school effectiveness and school
improvement were used as two different areas covering close parts of the actual
knowledge territory. School effectiveness had an immediate appeal on the
conservative politicians that were dominant in the US and in England. The
leading political people in these two countries changed the rules of the game for
the researchers. It become difficult to get state funding for studies of the
egalitarian and grass-root democratic strategies of school change that had
developed through the sixties and the seventies (i.e. Schmuck et al., 1975). The
rational restructuring of schools was more attractive, with a hope of quick
results in slow working social organisations. The term to describe the
knowledge field in the US turned over to restructuring, but in Europe the other
denominations of the territory have been kept. As Creemers and Reezigt (1997)
shows there is however several tendencies to link school effectiveness thinking
together with school improvement from the middle of the eighties and onwards.
Low acceptance of school improvement knowledge
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The territory is however still not a very well accepted and respected one. Some
anecdotal evidence might illustrate. In the beginning of the nineties, I and a
Danish colleague made a condensed version of the school improvement
literature that was published by the OECD during the eighty´s for a
Scandinavian audience (Ekholm and Ploug-Olsen, 1991). We were supported
by the Council of Ministries of the Nordic Countries to do the volume and
people from the publishing house of this council, NORD, helped us with the
editing. However, the head of this publishing house was rather sceptical
towards the title of the book “Förbättringar av skolor“(in English
Improvements of schools), as he thought that people in the field would associate
too much with a book on architecture. Another incident that made me aware of
the low degree of acceptance that the school improvement territory have was
during an intensive week that I spent in Paris in 1989 together with 25
colleagues at the International Institute for Educational Planning to produce a
book that could be used when planning for quality of education in developing
countries (Ross and Mählck, 1990). I tried to put forward ideas on how the
knowledge that had been produced within the school effectivity tradition and
the school improvement tradition could be integrated into the traditional
thinking within the comparative and statistical approach to educational systems.
The interest to use that kind of knowledge as a part of strategy to plan for better
education was very small among the leading persons at the institute. Later,
when I have spent time in one developing country as an adviser to the National
Institute of Education of Sri Lanka, I have found that the need for this kind of
knowledge is great. And as have been shown in studies made in this country
(Perera and Lieynenga, 1995), the use of this knowledge field have been of
good value.
A plea for a stable name of the territory
One of the problems using the knowledge about school improvement is that the
territory changes its name rather quickly. We are invited to this conference to
work on the theme The challenge of school transformation. I have been
involved as a researcher and an actor within the school improvement area since
the late sixties. During these thirty years the knowledge field have changed its
denomination at least every five years. Innovations in education, school
innovations, inservice-training in education, school development, restructuring
of schools, school improvement, Maybe we could gain from being less
changeable in this area. It helps a field of knowledge to be able to keep a
denomination stable, as it becomes more easy to the users to identify the content
and where it is possible to utilise. Another name on the knowledge basis might
help the use of it. The proposal imbedded in the name of this conference school transformation - is not what I would like to see. It gives to many
associations to electricity or to the lives of animals, where for instance the
7
change between different forms of living among insects (from caterpillar to
butterfly) are real transformations.
What we have built knowledge about is school improvement, how schools do
when they raise the quality of their inner lives and when the results of learning
among the students become better. Either we could stay with the denomination
of the territory as school improvement, and really decide together to keep that
for many years, which I think would help our efforts to disseminate the
knowledge to many people, or if school improvement is too much of a limited
speciality within the territory under development, we can of course choose
another denomination that could be used for many years. If so, my proposal is
that we call the knowledge field school amelioration. Amelioration is a seldom
used expression in English, based on Latin (melior=better) and its French
development ameliorer. The expression have a meaning and it is neither used
nor misused.
Concentration on dissemination
To be able to understand what parts of the large bulk of knowledge that have
been produced on school improvement I think it is important that the knowledge
comes into more regular use. What we have seen so far, is to a large extent a
utilisation of the knowledge by fascinated users. The real test of the quality of
the knowledge within the field of school improvement may come when the less
interested and less enthusiastic user acts with it. But before we reach such a
state where a broader use of the school improvement knowledge is apparent we
need to face the problem to get the knowledge disseminated and accepted as
important. The school improvement knowledge seems to be most easily adopted
by people that already have the same perspective on schools as the knowledge
producers have. One such group is school leaders, that share the view of schools
as local organisations that most researchers in the field hold. In my country,
Sweden, we have since the middle of 1970 trained new school leaders in a
national education programme. In this programme literature, thoughts and
actions based on the school improvement knowledge have been frequently
(Ekholm, 1992) used. The participants have started to use the ideas, but one
important learning from this long-lasting and ongoing field experiment in
knowledge dissemination is that the knowledge still is difficult to use in the
normal school setting. The school leaders try to use it, but also give frequent
testimonies about the difficulties to get teachers to adopt the knowledge. They
do not seem to share the perspective of the school as a local organisation, that
the school leaders keep in their minds. They have a stronger concentration on
the classroom level and do not share the school leaders interest for creating new
infrastructures of the school to make improvements more possible.
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Maybe we ought to spend some energy on inventing ways to help the
knowledge about school improvement to become a every teacher kind of
knowledge. What are the effective strategies to get this kind of knowledge on
the lists of literature during pre-service training of teachers? Do we need to
create alliances with other important knowledge areas, like for instance theories
of instruction, learning theories or classroom organisation? Areas that are
highly respected and appearing as knowledge descriptions all over the world.
Maybe we should use the strategies that the people behind knowledge about
quality check and quality development have used. They do not stay with
educating people about the ideas, but they also point out who have accepted the
ideas by the use of accreditation. Maybe the use of school improvement
knowledge would be much more frequent if we introduce a quality mark that
says that you are both familiar with the school improvement knowledge, that
you are using it and that school improvement specialists are checking your
knowledge use every five years? School improvement knowledge is however
not an isolated phenomena. What we have succeeded to show is working in
schools also have sense in many other organisations. Maybe we should help
schools to cross-fertilise their improvement work by getting them to develop
together with other organisations. To join a bank and a hospital that are
occupied by using the knowledge on improvement (or should we call it
amelioration?) may help the school to learn more about its own movements and
its internal life. It helps to look at others when you want to learn about your self
and if school people looked more at others and their strivings to become better
they might explore all the similarities instead of being fascinated by the
differences.
9
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